


a steaming swamp and a troubled heart

by sidonay



Category: Fargo (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Canonical Character Death, F/M, Loss, Minor Original Character(s)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-18
Updated: 2017-06-18
Packaged: 2018-11-15 18:11:53
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,055
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11236449
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sidonay/pseuds/sidonay
Summary: If he had been taken, been killed by a person, she could get them back for it, give them what they had coming for taking him away. But how could she get revenge on nature? She’d spend the rest of her life with a fire in her chest and no one to answer for it. All it did was take, take, take. What did she have left?Movement to her right and Wrench is standing beside her.Maybe, she thinks, looking at his profile. Maybe that.





	a steaming swamp and a troubled heart

**Author's Note:**

> I really wanted to write something for Nikki and Wrench because I absolutely adore them but AUs seem to be the only things I can do anymore so an AU is what you get. Sort of? It’s complicated. This was supposed to be something very different but it became this instead. I fully realize that taking characters from a show called Fargo and moving them all the way to a fictional area in the South seems sort of nonsensical but I didn’t feel as if this story would have worked the way I wanted it to in the cold.

When Nikki was only nine years old, her mother had sat her down at the fold-down kitchen table in their trailer park home and told her to never fall in love with the dead.

“It’ll bring you nothing but harm,” she had said, “To give your heart to bones.”

She’d said that and then given Nikki a sun-warmed can of pop from a dwindling case kept under her bed (leftovers from a school function, a well-meaning, ‘I won’t tell if you won’t’ from a concerned teacher that Nikki’s mother didn’t have the heart to tell her they had no room for) and sent her outside because the sugars in her drink attracted flies and, once flies get into your house, you won’t ever be able to get them out.

(Too quick to kill, too stupid to leave.)

Nikki was eighteen when she thought to ask what you’re supposed to do when the person you’ve given your heart to dies before you can join them. Can you still love them then? Can you love someone who’s gone missing? (A boy from town had run from home one lazy summer evening after an argument with his older sister. He was six and his body was never found. Were his parents wrong for loving a child who was both alive _and_ dead?)

She would never get an answer because, three months earlier, she had woken up in the middle of the night to bare heels and the hem of a nightgown disappearing out the door.

That was the last time Nikki saw her mother.

A deputy named Gloria had found her car at the entrance to Plymline Swamp two days shy of Nikki’s eighteenth birthday, a week after the woman had gone missing.

“That’s that then,” the sheriff had told her. “Someone gets lost in Plymline, you ain’t going to see them again.”

That was that. The swamp was a thief, the missing can still be loved, and, for awhile, Nikki was on her own.

 

& & &

 

Technically, drinking while she worked ( _whistling_ , her boss had told her, _is also forbidden_ ) was against the rules but, when it’s almost midnight and it’s still eighty-seven degrees out—the only cool air from an ancient, rusted fan screwed to the corner of the single-story, shack of a bar—a beer so cold it should have been slush is more of a necessity than an indulgence.

There’s only two people there not including herself: Leo, the community drunk—head down and drooling at his table that wobbled every time he shifted—and Wrench, the drifter who had showed up two weeks ago, just passing through. (He had written it on a napkin when Nikki had asked what he was doing here because this place wasn’t exactly somewhere a person just up and decided to move to, looking for opportunities; she’d asked if he was mute but he shook his head, pointed by his ear, brought his finger down his cheek, stopped right by the side of his mouth. Nikki had never learned to speak with her hands, but she was smart enough to figure out what he meant that time. _Deaf._ )

“Normally people who are ‘just passing through’,” Nikki had written to him on the back of the same napkin, the pen bleeding through, “Only stay for a day or two.” He’d shrugged, the fringe on the jacket she couldn’t understand how he could be wearing in heat like this shimmying. “Okay.” He taught her the sign for _beer_ and, in return, she warned him not to sit with his legs sticking out too far from under the table because Leo used the furniture to prop himself up on the way to the bathroom and she didn’t want to clean up the blood when he tripped over Wrench’s feet.

There’s a television mounted on the wall—just over the neon light for a brand that they didn’t sell—and most nights she preferred to have it off, liked the radio instead—a station from a few towns over somehow reaching them perfectly clear—but tonight she had it on, felt like she needed a connection to the outside world for a couple of hours. Besides, she wanted to have a look at the weather forecast because it felt like there was rain coming but feeling it and knowing it for sure are two different things.

She’s watching the tail end of a cereal commercial when the door opens which was surprising just by itself but is even more so because there in the doorway is Gloria, the same woman who had found Nikki’s mother’s car at the swamp. She had moved up in the ranks since then but had been given the low-person-on-the-totem-pole work of checking in on Buxstead every now and then, making sure none of the three-hundred or so people who lived here killed each other since the last time she stopped by, making sure the place hadn’t burned down overnight. Seeing her here, here and now, must have meant something devilish had happened.

“Gloria,” Nikki says, leans on the counter. Gloria smiles tightly, hates being greeted so informally. “What’re you doing here?”

“It’s Ray,” Gloria says, “He’s gone.” Ray worked at the hardware store named after his father, came in to drink sometimes, once or twice a week. He was sweet to Nikki and, at first, she had thought it just an act because he wanted something from her but then she’d looked him right in the eyes and, damn, if he wasn’t being entirely sincere each and every time. It was just who he was as a human being.

“Gone?” Nikki asks. “‘Gone’ as in ‘dead’?” People liked to use that word when someone dies. They’re _gone_.

“‘Gone’ as in ‘missing’,” Gloria says.

“It’s kind of late to be asking around about a missing grown man, isn’t it?” Nikki asks, tries to use humor to fight the sour feeling starting in her stomach.

“It is,” Gloria admits with a sigh, hands on her belt and she wanders up over to the counter, stands between two barstools so the two of them didn’t have to talk too loud. “But Ray’s brother… He owns a business over in Litchbury and the new sheriff likes to be friends with people who own businesses.” _This was a favor._ “Have you seen him?”

“Not since last week,” Nikki says and, once the words leave her mouth, she realizes how strange it actually was. He wasn’t exactly what would qualify as a ‘regular’ (not like Leo, not like what Wrench was turning out to be) but not seeing him at all should have been out of ordinary enough for her to notice sooner. She silently chastises herself. Gloria checks over her shoulder, looks back to Nikki.

“What about those guys?”

“Leo’s done for the night. Won’t get anything from him. You can try asking Wrench. You have a picture?”

“Of Ray?” Gloria asks. Nikki nods. “Not on me, no. Why?”

“He’s only been here two weeks. I don’t know where he goes during the day, who he sees. He might not know who Ray is by name, that’s all.”

“I’ll ask anyway,” Gloria says. “Since I’m already here.”

“You can try.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means he doesn’t talk,” Nikki says. “Not with his mouth. Finger-talking.”

“Ah,” Gloria says but it’s not enough to dissuade her and she walks over, stands on the other side of Wrench’s table and, even though he’s sitting down and she’s on her feet, he still manages to seem so much bigger than her. Wrench stares at her, frowning, and the two of them are like that for what feels like ages. “You know Ray?” She asks eventually and he shakes his head which could mean _I don’t_ or, possibly, _I don’t understand you_. Gloria seems to take it as the latter because she walks away, back over to Nikki. “Think he might be lying?” Or maybe not.

“He’s not my best friend,” Nikki says as a way of telling her _I haven’t got a clue_. She can’t even tell what he’s feeling more than half the time but she _does_ get the sense that he’s not happy. Gloria glances at Leo. “You can try to wake him if you want.”

“I’ll find him in the afternoon, when he’s sober,” Gloria says. “You’ll let me know if you see or hear anything.” It’s not a question. Nikki nods, turns behind her, opens the cooler and puts a fresh bottle on the bar. She doesn’t say anything about it but she doesn’t have to.

“I’m working, Swango. You know I can’t take that. Wouldn’t say no to some water, though.”

“I think Joe keeps a few bottles in the fridge in the back,” Nikki says, starts to go but stops when Gloria says:

“A glass of tap water would be fine.”

Nikki laughs.

“You don’t want to drink the tap water around here. Especially not at midnight.”

Gloria leaves with a plastic bottle sweating in her hands and a promise of letting Nikki know what happens even though she doesn’t really have a reason to other than common courtesy. The bottle that Nikki had taken out for her is still sitting there and Nikki looks up just in time to see Wrench look like he was trying to wave at her. _Beer_. She smiles at him. He does not smile back.

 

— — —

 

Nikki thinks about Ray as she’s trying to sleep that night, her pillow soaked with sweat and insects buzzing right outside her window, stares at the wall and then at her hands. She wracks her brain for something he may have said to her over the past month, someone whom he had pissed off, owed money to, but he wasn’t that type of guy, didn’t _seem_ like the type to purposely get himself into trouble.

He could have just up and left. People do that. Nikki is painfully aware that people can do that.

And yet... something about this already doesn’t feel right.

“He’ll turn up,” Nikki says to no one, says it like there’s another voice in the room telling her that she’s never going to see him again, that the last time was a couple Fridays ago when Ray had paused in the doorway, turned like he wanted to nervously ask her something, his balding head shining in the heat but then seemed to change his mind and just walked out. Nikki replays the moment twice, not knowing if it was better or worse that she might not ever know what it was he wanted to say. “He’ll turn up,” she repeats, lying to herself.

 

— — —

 

When Gloria shows up two days later, Nikki doesn’t need her to say anything to know that it’s bad news.

“I don’t want to hear it,” Nikki says, busies herself by wiping down the counter. It’s a strange time of evening where not even Leo has shown up yet, it’s just her here by her lonesome, passing the time. Gloria doesn’t have the excuse of not hearing Nikki because, sure, the radio is on but it isn’t loud.

“They found his car by the Plymline.”

“Gloria. No.”

“I’m sorry,” she says the same way she had said it when telling Nikki about her mother, like she thought she and Ray had a history instead of just starting to build one from scratch.

“That’s that then, is it?” Nikki snaps. “No use looking for him, not in the swamp.”

“Not for sure,” Gloria says. “He could have abandoned it, made it look like he got taken by it so they’d stop looking. It’s a possibility. A slim one.” ‘They’ not ‘us’. “I’ll keep checking around for as long as they let me.”

“And how long is that? Fifteen minutes?”

“That’s not fair,” Gloria says, but she doesn’t exactly disagree. She leaves shortly after that because there really isn’t much more for either of them to say.

 

— — —

 

“The swamp,” Nikki says to Wrench later, slamming his beer down on his table with more force than was probably necessary. “That _fucking_ swamp.” He looks at her and then folds his three inside fingers over, holds out his thumb and pinky like he’s at a rock concert, taps the folded fingers on his chin, brow furrowed, which Nikki would find out much later meant: _What’s wrong?_ For now, she could just tell by his face what he was saying. She walks away, steps behind the bar, comes back with a spiral-bound notebook and a red pen, sits down across from him because the only other person here was, once again, Leo, who didn’t need to be babysat.

“Plymline Swamp,” Nikki writes. “When people go missing there, the cops stop looking for them.” Wrench’s hand lifts from the table, hesitates and then takes the pen from her, scrawls:

“Why?”

“It’s the swamp,” she writes. “How it’s always been. I hate it.” She underlines the word _hate_ three times, nearly rips through the paper. She hates the swamp, hates how afraid people are of it. Gloria says she’ll keep looking but she’d get stopped eventually and then Ray would just be another name among the lost. She realizes she never actually said _why_ she was mad about the swamp, figures maybe Wrench got it through context clues but tells him anyway. “It took Ray.” Wrench makes a fist, rubs it in a tight circle over his chest, then takes the pen from her, writes:

“Sorry.” Another pause, like he’s thinking of saying something but isn’t sure and Nikki remembers Ray in the doorway. “Lost someone too.” She reads it, sits back and then mimics what he had done with his hand just seconds before. _Sorry_.

 

— — —

 

“I tried,” Gloria says the next day. She’s on Nikki’s front porch—what there is of one—instead of at the bar and Nikki stands there, arms crossed. “But it’s the swamp.”

When she leaves, Nikki looks back into her empty place and wishes she had someone to talk to, thinks about Ray and then thinks about Wrench. The town is small, barely a town in the first place. There weren’t many places he could be staying.

Maybe it was strange to go looking for a drifter who had stopped drifting when there were so many other people here that she knew better, that would lend a couple sympathetic ears but his ears—even though they couldn’t hear her—are the ones that she wanted.

 

— — —

 

Gracelynn is home, which is odd because, normally, she’d be at the church this time of day and she looks equally surprised to see Nikki standing on her doorstep.

“What can I do for you, Miss Swango?”

“I’ve been asking around about that drifter,” Nikki says. “Calls himself 'Wrench'? Bill finally told me you were renting your spare room to him. Is he here?”

“He is,” Gracelynn says. “Would you like me to get him for you?”

“I’d rather come in,” Nikki says, thinks about just barreling her over, not waiting for a proper invitation but Gracelynn—either out of goodness of her aging heart or simply because she sees something—steps aside, tells Nikki that he’s at the back of the house, in the room with all the windows ( _the ‘sunroom’ is what I believe it’s called_ , she said), asks if she’d like something to drink.

“He’s been nursing a glass of Tom’s whiskey,” she says, disapproval tinting the edges of her voice when she says it.

“I don’t know how long I’ll be staying,” Nikki replies and Gracelynn tells her she’ll bring her some iced tea.

Wrench is sitting in a cushioned wicker chair, looks remarkably out of place amongst the florals and wind chimes hanging in the large windows, must see or feel someone coming but looks caught off guard to see that it’s not his temporary landlord but Nikki instead. She nods her head, tries a smile but even she’s aware of how weak it is.

“Here you go,” a voice says. A hand gives her a glass and then feet disappear as if she knows they need some privacy. Nikki takes a sip, lets the cold and sweetness wash over her tongue before finally going to take a seat across from him. A faint, hot breeze hits the back of her neck and she realizes she forgot to bring something to write on. She wets her fingers with the condensation and melting ice, leans forward and writes _hi_ on the small dark wood table in between them. He says hello back in his own way and then they fall into silence.

She had come to talk but she finds that just sitting with him isn’t too bad either and he doesn’t seem too bothered by it.

She’s distracted, staring out towards the expansive backyard, at an old swing-set that’s overgrown with weeds, when she sees movement out of the corner of her eye, sees that he’s trying to get her attention and he starts signing at her, a series of sentences, and she watches the flurry of fingers, at the frustration on his face because he _knows_ she doesn’t understand. She signs _sorry_ at him because she definitely knows that one now and she figures the sign for _beer_ wasn’t going to be particularly helpful right now.

He sighs, hoists himself up, disappears into the rest of the house and she hears Gracelynn say: “What’s that? Oh! Let me see… here we are. Will this work?” He comes back with a stack of printer paper and a permanent marker.

“Still no luck?” He writes. She shakes her head, shrugs, signals for him to give her the paper and he reaches, she reaches, realizes how silly it is to pass it back and forth like that and moves to the floor, sits right up against the table, closer to him, leans on the hard surface to write back.

“I told you, they won’t look anymore. If I want to find him, I have to do it myself. I'd have to go there.”

“So why don’t you?” He scribbles in response and she holds the marker, poised to respond but then pauses. She’s had dreams of stripping down, wading into the muck and plant life, blindly searching until her hands dig up a body from below the surface. Sometimes they were nightmares, sometimes not but, even with a boat and machinery meant for this kind of thing, meant for dredging, she wasn’t sure it was possible, no matter how much it made her blood boil to think about it.

“How much longer you staying?” She asks him instead of answering his question. He shrugs. “Who’d you lose?” It’s none of her business, not really, but he’s the one who brought it up first. He stares her down but he doesn’t look angry. He just looks drained.

“Grady,” he writes at long last and then: “Partner.”

 

— — —

 

Even when her mother disappeared, Nikki wouldn’t go to the swamp. It just hadn’t seemed like an option, hadn’t made sense because it wasn’t like she could go out there, call for her and have her rise out of the mud and come home.

But here she was, in bed at three in the morning, thinking about her conversation with Wrench.

_So why don’t you?_

 

— — —

 

Because he can’t hear it, Gracelynn is the one to answer the door and she looks pissed, her wrinkled mouth pinched, hand holding a bathrobe around her body. Moths hit and tap the orange light she had flicked on and their shadows flitter across her face.

“I’ll get him,” she says instead of telling Nikki to get lost. “I’ll tolerate this just this once. Wait here.”

Nikki had done some research before she came here, just one phrase in particular, and she uses it as soon as he comes down the stairs and he sees her.

Index fingers rolling over each other first, fists with thumbs sticking up slightly, meeting together in front of her chest, uses a single hand facing outward, fingers and thumb curled slightly.

 _Come with me_.

 

— — —

 

They ride in her truck, the windows rolled down, and they can smell the swamp long before they see it.

There’s a gate that’s supposed to keep people out but it’s bent, beaten and of no use to anyone anymore, a _no trespassers_ sign long since lost to the grass and Nikki drives on through, parks just a few feet away from where the water starts creeping up on land, shuts off the engine but not the headlights and then stays where she is.

Ray’s car must have been towed away at some point but the tire tracks were still there. They stopped just about where she did, as if he pulled up and sat here, same as them, staring out. Was he looking for something in particular or not looking at anything at all?

Opening the door, her feet barely make a noise on the soft ground.

“Goddammit, Ray,” she says. If he had been taken, been killed by a person, she could get them back for it, give them what they had coming for taking him away. But how could she get revenge on nature? She’d spend the rest of her life with a fire in her chest and no one to answer for it. “Fuck you,” she yells. “Fuck you, Plymline.” All it did was take, take, take. What did she have left?

Movement to her right and Wrench is standing beside her.

Maybe, she thinks, looking at his profile. Maybe that.

 

— — —

 

She takes him back to Gracelynn’s home but, when he goes to leave, she grabs his arm, stops him, has no way of communicating in the way he did so she just touches his hand, the one resting on his seat, and he looks down at it, expressionless, unreadable.

She takes her hand back, points to him, turns her index and middle fingers into legs, has them start walking on air and then points at herself, back at him.

 _When you leave_ , her gesturing says, _I’m coming with you_.

He doesn’t reply, either because he doesn't want to or because he doesn’t know what to say.

 

— — —

 

Two days later, she’s at the bar when Gloria walks in again and Nikki feels her blood go ice cold. Gloria must see it on her face because she puts up a placating hand, smiles.

“I’m just here for a beer,” she says and there were better places to drink in than some shack in Buxstead, but she came here instead. “Also I went by Gracelynn’s, to check up on her since she and Ray got along alright.” Nikki hadn’t known. “She told me to tell you, if I saw you, that her tenant is leaving tonight, after dinner. She insisted on feeding him one more time.”

“Okay,” Nikki says.

“So, the beer,” Gloria says. “And also goodbye.”

“Goodbye?” Nikki asks. “You going somewhere?”

“No. But you are.” Gloria smiles again when Nikki puts down her drink, gives her a look. “I can tell.”

“Not much left here for me,” Nikki confesses.

“It’s good,” Gloria says, clarifies: "That you're getting out of here."

“It’s good,” Nikki repeats. "It's really good."

 

— — —

 

Nikki waits until she’s sure that dinner was over—didn’t want to get trapped with a plate of food and polite conversation—and she’s just about to knock when the door opens like he could sense her coming and then there he is, bag slung over his shoulder. She gestures over her shoulder with her thumb, towards her truck.

He still looks disbelieving, unsure, but, once Nikki has made a decision, especially one about another person, she sticks with it. He doesn’t ask for the keys as if he knows she won’t relinquish them, that if he has somewhere specific in mind he wants to go he’ll just have to trust her to get them there.

He puts his bag between them in the front seat. Sticks up his index finger, taps it with his other, makes it look like a plus sign.

 _Positive?_ Is she sure she wants to come, that she wants this?

She taught herself something else before she got here, just like when she came for him so they could go to the swamp, makes a fist, moves it like she’s nodding her head and then starts the engine.

**Author's Note:**

> I did my level best with the ASL. Single words came from [here](https://www.handspeak.com/word/), the phrase "come with me" came from [here](https://www.signingsavvy.com/wordlist/15560/COME+WITH+ME/550937).


End file.
